14 DAY TRIAL // The security integrated chip market has a special wonder child like all other segments of the technology industry: smart cards. Samsung has just unveiled a new type of smart card integrated circuit.
Or rather, Samsung has just officially introduced a new manufacturing process technology that can make new smart card ICs.
Long story short, the first 45 nanometer (nm) embedded flash 9eFlash0 logic process has been formally launched.
It is based on the "technological synergies" brought about by decades of work in embedded flash and logic process development.
The 45nm process improves both flash cell structure and the operating scheme. The random access times is 50% better, for example, and the power efficiency is 25% improved as well, compared to 80nm.
"Samsung's 45nm eFlash logic process has the potential to be broadly adopted into various components for security solutions and mobile devices, including smart card IC, NFC IC, eSE (embedded secure element) and TPM (Trusted platform module)," said Taehoon Kim, vice president of marketing, system LSI business, Samsung Electronics.
"The excellent performance from this smart card test chip will help solidify our leadership in the security IC market."
Smart card ICs based on the new technology have an endurance of 1 million cycles per flash memory cell. The best in a world where the average is 500,000 cycles.
Besides standard smart cards, the eFlash will serve in the fields of consumer microcontrollers and automotive chips that require higher speed, better memory efficiency and higher memory capacity.
Initial samples of the 45nm eFlash will become available by the second half of 2014. That's right, despite Samsung celebrating the 45nm process, it will not have working products ready this year, or even early in the next. Samsung has merely determined that it is ready to move things, to deploy them at a commercial scale.